#genius

The only guaranteed way to be a genius is to surround yourself with idiots. ↗

— Ziad K. Abdelnour

#idiots #age

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times. ↗

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#genius #inspirational #art

Holly frowned at her. "Glad to see you've forgiven yourself so quickly." "Harboring feelings of guilt can have a negative affect on mental health." "Child geniuses," growled Holly. "Genii," said Minerva. ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#minerva-paradizo #genius

A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#genius #thought #genius

I am not sure if women are attracted to genius. Can you imagine the wise wizard winning the woman over the gallant swordsman? It seems rather otherworldly in more ways than one. ↗

— Criss Jami

#attraction #fantasy #funny #funny-but-true #gallant

Geniuses that point the way exist in abundance, but mediocrity's true prophet has yet to emerge. We may not be able to choose a direction to go, but at least we’re still walking around. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#genius #humor #idiots #funny

There's a fine mascara line between genius and insanity ↗

— Josh Stern

#humor

The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated. ↗

— Criss Jami

#complication #genius #intelligence #practicality #practicality-for-intellectuals

Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius. ↗

— Sam Kean

#science #spite #love

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#genius #intellect #proust #seed #social